


the same green sea

by fuhllmetal



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Betazoid Allura, Betazoid Coran, Half-Vulcan Keith, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, diplomatic intrigue, inspired just a bit by the star trek original series episode "the enterprise incident", secret reveal, set about 20 years after the events of star trek 2009, so watch your spoilers accordingly, the galra are romulans, the sheith is just a mirror of kirk/spock in the regular canon and also a vehicle for Pain Town, the voltron star trek au that no one asked for but i decided to devote myself to regardless, this starts out nice but its going to hell in a hand basket real quick
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 11:09:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7682116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuhllmetal/pseuds/fuhllmetal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Takashi Shirogane and the crew of the brand-spanking-new USS Voltron are spearheading the first Romulan-Federation peace talks in decades. That in and of itself sounds difficult enough. Unfortunately, there seems to be something else brewing underneath of the surface, and it isn't pleasant. Shiro just hopes he, his first officer, and their mostly-illicit relationship don't get caught canoodling between meetings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the same green sea

**Author's Note:**

> I KNOW IM STILL IN THE MIDDLE OF WRITING ANOTHER ADVENTURE FIC. JUST TRUST ME. I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING. (I DON'T.) i'm going to be alternating between updating my two active fics, so don't worry. I Have A Plan.
> 
> shortly before seeing star trek beyond i had the Brilliant idea of a star trek au for voltron, the best star trek au i've ever come across being completely honest, and was struck with a series of brilliant ideas: half-vulcan/half-human keith, starship captain shiro, sheith: k/s round two, and something else incredibly devious that i'm not revealing yet because it would ruin the point of this wonderful journey i'm going to take you all on  
> buckle up kids this is going to get, not ONLY painful, but also dorky because i care about star trek too much

“Captain, we’re approaching the Romulan Neutral Zone.”

Captain Takashi Shirogane - Shiro to his friends - turned his captain’s chair to face his navigation officer at the helm. His face was carefully calm, serene almost, and he adjusted his position in the seat.

“And, lieutenant? You seem like you have something to add,” he replied. The navigator turned around, his face pulled into a confused frown.

“Well, we’re starting to come up on it pretty fast, so what are your orders?” The lieutenant crossed his arms. Shiro looked at him like he grew another head.

“I tell you when we change course, lieutenant. Just keep us headed where we’re going.”

 

The lieutenant nodded, clearly uncomfortable with the notion, but he didn’t touch the controls. The pilot next to him raised a slanted eyebrow, but he said nothing.

“I saw you raise that eyebrow, Keith,” The lieutenant muttered. Both of Keith’s eyebrows lowered immediately. “You want a fight?”

“We’re in the Neutral Zone.”

“Best place to fight!”

Keith puffed a sigh and continued to pointedly look away from his companion at the helm. The other, realizing that his invitation would not be RSVP’d to, deflated a little but didn’t try to revive what was dead on arrival.

 

“Hey, maybe the Romulans would appreciate a show of power before the negotiations,” the communications officer in the back of the room supplied. “Then again, a fight between you two would just be Keith completely destroying your ass, Lance, which isn’t exactly a vote of confidence for the strength of the Federation.”

“Hey, watch your language on duty, officer.” Shiro turned to scowl at the communications officer. They muffed a cackle with their unoccupied hand.

“Yeah, Pidge! Watch your language!” Lance yelled, triumphant as if he was the one that told them off. Keith raised an eyebrow again. The cycle looked dangerously close to repeating itself, but it was fortunately cut off by a ship dropping out of warp and approaching their ship.

 

“It’s a Romulan warbird,” Keith supplied.

“They’re hailing us,” Pidge announced.

“Must be the Romulan envoy. Patch them through, Pidge.” Shiro readjusted his position in the seat again, lifting his robotic prosthetic from his knee to the arm of his chair. Pidge calibrated the frequency and responded to the hail. A Romulan’s face popped up on the view screen before the bridge.

The Romulan’s face was square with a strong jaw and especially distinguishable ears, taller than those of your average Romulan. The ridges above his brow bone were very well defined, and below them, his eyes glinted yellow in the low light of his ship.

 

“Commander Sendak to the Federation ship _USS Voltron_.”

“We’re receiving you, Commander. Captain Shirogane, pleased to make your acquaintance.” Shiro put on his best diplomacy smile, forcing his posture to be firm but not aggressive. Sendak didn’t have the same idea. The camera was fixed so that it was slightly below his face, making it as if the entire bridge of the _Voltron_ was underneath of his gaze.

“ _Not very subtle_ ,” Lance whispered out of the corner of his mouth to Keith next to him. Keith didn’t even look his way, but his eyebrow twitched. Lance took that as a victory.

 

“Whether you’re pleased or not doesn’t matter, considering it wouldn’t make a difference either way. Do you have the coordinates for the designated rendezvous point?” Sendak asked. Shiro’s smile looked considerably more forced now, but he kept the ruse going.

“Yes, they’re in our databanks. The planet is a considerable distance from our current location, but that won’t be an issue. At most it’ll take an Earth day and a half, but I don’t anticipate it taking that long.”

“We will meet you there in eighteen of your hours.” Sendak cut off the transmission. The warbird went into warp within seconds and was gone in a flash. Shiro let go deep breath and sunk into his chair, putting a hand over his face.

 

“Well isn’t he just lovely,” Pidge said, picking at a stray piece of their hair.

“If we’re going to make it there in his time frame, we’re going to be pushing the warp engines to max the whole time.” Keith turned around from his station to face the captain. Shiro removed the hand from his eyes.

“Oh, Hunk isn’t going to like that.” The security officer a few stations away piped up, twirling his bushy orange mustache. If anyone else had been doing it, it would have looked smug, but something about his whole appearance made it impossible for him to seem like he had much superiority over anyone.

“He loves those engines like they’re his own children,” Lance said. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to convince him.”

Shiro used up all of his remaining emergency professionalism to keep himself from groaning.

 

The _Voltron_ was a small ship, her primary mission and purpose diplomacy, but she could pack a serious punch when she needed to. She was also pretty speedy, but she was definitely not made for extended periods of full steam warp engines blasting factor ten and that became clear after the first five hours of nonstop travel to her destination, Delta Phi IV.

Finally off-duty for the day, Shiro opened the door to his quarters and collapsed into the chair right next to the threshold. He ran his flesh hand down his face. From one chair to the next, he thought ruefully, and he decided that after he caught his breath, he’d go somewhere that didn’t require him to sit down.

This mission was already off to a rough start, even before they started trying to be diplomatic. That couldn’t be a good sign. Shiro hoped it was just the Romulan commander - Sendak - being bristly about the time it would take to get the talks started, but it wasn’t like that was the Federation’s fault. The Romulans were the ones who planned out all of the rendezvous locations, so if they hadn’t wanted to wait a bit, they could have put the confirmation-that-a-whole-fleet-wasn’t-coming meeting a tad closer to the actual destination.

If the actual talks were anything like what Shiro just sat through, he was now decidedly worried about the very real possibility that absolutely nothing would get done at the least, or an absolute destruction of any positive relations the Federation had built up in the past couple decades at worst.

 

After the destruction of Vulcan twenty years ago at the hand of the Romulan Nero, the Federation was naturally very wary of the Romulans for quite a while. The Romulan Senate vehemently denied any affiliation with Nero, claiming he was a rogue agent not acting under any orders coming from Romulus, and the Federation ended up giving them the benefit of the doubt after a decade or so.

The past ten years were spent trying to improve the tenuous peace between the two galactic powers. All of the work put into the project, work that ended up leading to the construction of the _Voltron_ herself, was now culminating in the first in-person peace talks on a neutral planet.

Starfleet sent out some of its best and brightest, headed by the near-legendary Takashi Shirogane, to lead the mission. Shiro hated being called that, not just because it was half-hearted as hell, but because it felt like other people trying to feed his ego now so they could be in his good graces when he became a ‘real legend’ like James T. Kirk.

 

He was fortunate enough to get a fantastic crew out of this mission. The crew of the _Voltron_ had been together for a few months prior to now, but it was hard to deny that her construction wasn’t for this sole purpose.

The crew itself was very small, as they didn’t need many people, and it clocked in at just under 150 - officers and enlisted men combined. That led to some interesting senior officer assignments.

Commander Keith Kogane, the main pilot, was also Shiro’s first officer. He was promoted just for this mission as well, something everyone on board - including Keith - had squinted at, but he was clearly good at his job, so Shiro wasn’t complaining. He also had…storied history with Keith, which complicated things, but he ultimately had no qualms with having Keith at his right hand at all times.

Lieutenant Commander Lance Sanchez was their navigator and occasional pilot. He was a bit of a loose cannon and held a huge grudge against Keith for what seemed like too many reasons to pin down just one underlying cause, but he did stack up under pressure. He also made the bridge a little more ‘lively’ on the Alpha shift, something Shiro considered both a blessing and a curse.

The chief medical officer was Commander Allura Trad, a Betazoid who followed her empathetic talents and ended up an incredible diplomat. She was going to be juggling both her CMO duties and head diplomat duties during this mission, a position Shiro didn’t envy. She had an exceptionally calming and motherly - yet just as stern - disposition. Shiro hoped that would be as effective on Romulans as it was on his crew.

Lieutenant Pidge Holt served as the _Voltron_ ’s Chief Science Officer, which meant they handled both communications and non-tactical sensors on the bridge. Usually an engineering officer would handle communications, but Pidge had a gift for dealing with systems that talked to each other so prominent that it would be a crime to give the job to someone else. The crew was so small, too, that it wasn’t as much of a bureaucratic issue as it would be on, say, the flagship of the fleet. Pidge’s presence on the bridge was a bit like Lance’s, but they knew when to shut up. Generally.

The Chief Engineer was Lieutenant Hunk Mahi’ai, just as much of a genius with a warp core as Pidge was with a communications panel. Shiro was initially a little worried about Hunk after hearing his past with motion sickness, but according to Hunk, it only applied to shuttlecraft and assured his new captain that it wouldn’t be an issue if he just stayed in engineering and didn’t have to see the ship in motion. Shiro gave him the benefit of the doubt and left it there. Other than that, Hunk was a gentle soul who Shiro appreciated having around to placate Lance. It was too bad he wasn’t serving on the bridge.

Finally, there was the Security Chief, Lieutenant Commander Coran Kelibrut. Coran was an interesting man, to say the least, and was a bit hard to tolerate if you weren’t used to him. He wasn’t obnoxious like Lance or Pidge could be at the wrong moment, but he had his ways of creeping onto people’s nerves. Shiro was just glad that he was usually preoccupied enough with getting to work on the ship that his grandfather designed before his passing a couple years past. That, and Coran was more brilliant at tactics than met the eye.

 

Even though they had been together for four months max, Shiro felt like there was something special about this crew, even if they weren’t perfect. All of them were some of the most talented in the fleet. On top of that, when you got past some of their surface personality, all of them were pleasant and entertaining to converse with off-duty, even if _some_ of them were still stiff around him because of his captain status.

Keith had been stiff at first, not because Shiro was the captain, but because of a multitude of other reasons that Shiro didn’t want to think about now. Rubbing at his forehead to block out the uncomfortable memories, he tried to find something in his brain to think about that wasn’t the mission or the past. There wasn’t a whole else there, unfortunately.

Well, besides Keith, even if he was tightly woven to Shiro’s past. Their present was, for all intents and purposes, one of Shiro’s favorite parts about this mission, though. Yet no matter how much he loved it, he knew that until this mission was over, they had to keep it as much under wraps as possible lest they invoke the wrath of Starfleet’s ‘relationship patrol.’

The ‘patrol’ was almost certainly started after rumors of Captain Kirk and his first officer, Spock, being romantically involved were supposedly substantiated enough that Starfleet decided to take action against similar situations. Somehow the famous duo managed to weasel out of getting into any trouble, but Shiro doubted that he and Keith would get the same reprieve, even if he was ‘almost-legendary.’

 

Speak of the devil, Shiro heard a knock at his door right next him. He grinned and unlocked the door without checking who it was first. He didn’t need to check; there was only one person on this ship that would knock on his door instead of hit the buzzer.

Shiro stood up to meet Keith as he stepped through the door. Keith stopped short just inside the room, less than a foot away from Shiro, and the two of them stared at each other for a moment without a word before Shiro left a smile break across his face, the tension dissipating immediately.

He brought a hand up to Keith’s jawline and traced a line back to one of Keith’s pointed ears, tinged green at the tip, and stroked back down to his chin. The apples of Keith’s cheeks and all across the bridge of his nose were all olive now, but his eyes glinted with the same determination they always held. That was one of Shiro’s favorite parts of him.

 

Coming from the point where their flesh met, Shiro could feel the faint psychic thrum of Keith’s emotions flowing into him which only made him grin a little wider. There was, of course, an underlying current of _anxiety/trepidation/anticipation_ directed towards their mission, but _affection/adoration/security_ overpowered them to the point where Shiro barely even felt them. He was sure he was responding in kind.

After a few more beats of Shiro cupping Keith’s face wordlessly, Keith leaned up to meet his lips. Shiro willed his breath not to hitch - something he still found himself doing every time, as if the thrill of their relationship was still just as fresh as it was the first day after years of being on and off - and melted into the contact immediately.

The kiss was closed at first, but slowly it opened up to become just a bit sloppier. At this point, Shiro replaced his left hand on Keith’s face with his right - the prosthetic - and all but heard Keith whimper at the loss of hand contact. Shiro righted this by taking up Keith’s right hand in his left and gently stroking his index and middle fingers over Keith’s. It elicited a soft pant from Keith directly in Shiro’s mouth, and Shiro replied with a soft moan of his own.

 

Even though he didn’t get nearly the same intensity of sensation from Vulcan kissing as Keith, the resident half-Vulcan, did, just sensing Keith’s reaction through their touch-telepathic bond was more than enough for Shiro. Keith started getting more insistent, pushing Shiro back into the room towards his bed just barely big enough for the two of them.

When they finally hit the mattress, Shiro separated them for air and took in the sight hovering above him. They still were making hand-contact, Keith’s breaths coming out short and hot against Shiro’s face and neck. His whole face was completely green now, complementing his indigo eyes blown wide with anticipation, and Shiro’s breath really did catch this time.

Keith did a decent job at stifling a laugh at Shiro’s reaction, but Keith couldn’t hide his amusement through their skin-to-skin contact. Shiro’s tendency to gasp all the time when they were being sappy or similar became something of a running joke between the two by now, an old one at that, and Shiro rolled his eyes.

 

“You don’t have to stifle yourself around me, babe. I’m not going to tell anyone you have emotions.” Keith smacked Shiro on the shoulder for that one. Shiro laughed; the smack was well deserved. “Consider it payback for you mind-laughing at me.”

“Mind-laughing?” Keith asked, raising an eyebrow like he had earlier on the bridge. Now Shiro gently hit Keith on the shoulder - nothing more than a tap really - and Keith laughed out loud that time. 

“You know what I mean.” They were silent for a moment more. Keith moved away from hovering overtop of Shiro and slid onto the bed next to him. Shiro intertwined their fingers again. It didn’t hold the same connotation it had before, as the atmosphere of the room had shifted away from the intensity of before into a more subdued companionship.

 

“What are you nervous about, Takashi?” Keith asked out of the blue. Shiro could tell Keith already knew because it wasn’t that hard to figure out, so he figured Keith was just humoring him.

“Sendak was somehow more bristly than I was expecting,” Shiro replied, rolling over on the bed so he was facing Keith directly. “I mean, you saw him. He was prickly for a Romulan, which is saying something.”

Keith sent more amusement over their connection, but his facial expression didn’t shift an inch. Shiro didn’t restrain a smile at that very _Keith_ (very Vulcan in general, he supposed) mannerism.

“I wouldn’t say that worrying is illogical in this case, even if it’s usually not a very productive emotion, but I would save it for now, if I were you,” Keith said. “I’m confident that the Romulans are just as worried as you are, and it just so happened to manifest more in Sendak’s body language because he doesn’t care so much about appearances like you do.”

“Geez, break it to me harder,” Shiro snorted. “I’m not letting you get off with how wishy-washy that first conclusion was, either.”

“What does hygiene have to do with this?” Keith asked, deadpan, and Shiro sighed tiredly. Keith not only raised his eyebrow this time, but he also let the left corner of his lips tick upwards ever so slightly. _The little shit._

 

“I appreciate the sentiment. Let’s just leave it there; it’ll work out.” Shiro tightened his grip on Keith’s hand momentarily. Keith’s expression thawed out, the quirk of his lips softening into a private little smile meant for Shiro and Shiro alone, and Shiro’s heart melted right along with it.

God, he felt disgusting being this sappy, but Keith made it real hard not to be. Keith sent him the mental equivalent of a particularly vicious pinch on the cheek and detangled their hands. Taking that as a cue to move onto something else, Shiro sat up on the bed. Keith scooted up and over to sit next to him.

“What are you going to do now? We have a solid fifteen hours before we arrive.” Shiro asked.

“I was considering going to the training deck, and I was originally coming to your quarters to see if you were interested in joining me, but…” Keith trailed off, diverting his gaze to the floor. The tips of his tears flushed green. Shiro indulged in a smirk.

“But?”

“I got distracted.”

 

_Distracted. Right_. Looks like the ‘ _something else_ ’ they were moving onto turned out to be what they were just doing.

“Well, excuse me for the distraction I’m about to enable,” Shiro murmured, leaning into Keith’s neck and peppering kisses there. He could feel Keith’s vocal chords shudder as he choked out some indignant reply, but his first officer quickly regained his composure enough to speak.

“Quite unbecoming of a captain.” Keith’s voice rumbled in Shiro’s mouth, eliciting a soft moan on his end.

“Doesn’t say much good about his first officer, either,” he replied, ceasing his assault on Keith’s neck and moving up to his jaw instead. He took purchase on Keith’s lips, his final destination, and felt Keith’s smile against his lips.

Keith slowly pushed him down so he was lying on his back again, and Shiro savored the sensation all the way down. Prickly Romulans could wait.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos/comments are greatly appreciated and will be met with happy tears and many thanks!!


End file.
